Surety IT Virtualisation Solutions

IDC research shows that the digital universe - information that is created, captured, or replicated in digital form - was 281 exabytes in 2007. In 2011, the amount of digital information produced in the year should equal nearly 1,800 exabytes, or 10 times that produced in 2006. The compound annual growth rate between now and 2011 is expected to be almost 60%.

The digital explosion is a challenge facing all business owners, IT managers and CIO's. Data storage requirements continue to outstrip server capacity and you're faced with the option of either increasing your infrastructure, or finding ways to get more out of your existing hardware.

By increasing your infrastructure you increase your hardware expenditure, ongoing floor space requirements, power consumption and cooling costs.

With the help of VMware, Surety IT can get your IT infrastructure running as one giant pool of resources. Applications take what they need and give back what they don't.

Surety IT will help you implement a virtual infrastructure solution. We'll help you realise the full benefits of virtualisation and address the associated and ongoing challenges.


Challenge: Maximising IT Operations Resource Efficiency

Virtualisation introduces many new systems, tools, and processes. Research shows that a typical virtualisation deployment includes around 11 different platforms, technologies, and vendors. Moreover, through 2010 most organisations will still have a mixture of physical (or dedicated) and virtual (or shared) environments.

To deal with these challenges, many organisations duplicate management tools, teams, and processes for their virtual systems, and waste vast resources on manual management techniques. This manual, silo-based approach is hugely inefficient. It leads to higher costs for staff, software, and training.

Surety IT will help you avoid these problems by automating and integrating physical and virtual systems management.

We'll implement a unified approach that connects physical and virtual management teams and tools, and which automates common management activities (like provisioning, virtual resource allocation, or (VM migration). This will allow faster response to problems by automating detection, diagnosis, and remediation processes.


Challenge: VM Sprawl

Virtualisation reduces visibility into IT asset utilisation. Combined with easier and faster system deployment (a major outcome for almost 60% of all enterprises), virtualisation creates a new type of server sprawl, called virtual machine (or VM) sprawl.

VM sprawl damages compliance efforts, as software licenses are allocated without authorisation, insecure systems remain undetected, and regulatory controls are bypassed.

Surety IT will give you the tools to track software deployments, detect insecure configurations, and enforce audit processes, improving license, security, and regulatory compliance. Hardware usage will be tracked, and workloads assigned more efficiently. Servers can be reused when they are available, and powered off when they are unneeded. This will improve hardware utilisation, increase server consolidation ratios, extend system lifecycles, delay hardware refreshes, and reduce hardware purchase.


Challenge: Performance Requirements

In a virtual environment, with rapidly changing dynamic workload and resource allocation, your ability to establish and maintain performance requirements is especially vital.

Surety IT will help you implement a solution which ensures end user experiences are exceptional throughout the application lifecycle. With a comprehensive, end-to-end performance analysis and recording, solution you will be better able to establish real application performance requirements.


Challenge: Network and System Management

Centralisation of formerly distributed applications and desktops increases network traffic between the data centre and client or edge devices.

Surety IT will implement integrated toolsets for system and network management. This will allow you to proactively plan, predict and validate connectivity to prevent potential network bottlenecks.

During operations, real-time monitoring of network traffic changes and automated response to connection or bandwidth issues will allow you to rapidly diagnose and resolve any network performance issues if they do occur.